Principal Investigator: Lily Song

Dr. Lily Song is an urban planner and activist-scholar who specializes in studying and undertaking long-term community engagement practices in addition to being an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and the School of Public Policy and Urban Planning (College of Social Sciences and Humanities).

Her research and scholarship focus on the relations between urban infrastructure and redevelopment initiatives, socio-spatial inequality, and race, class, and gender politics in American cities and other decolonizing contexts. Her work both analyzes and informs infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of historically marginalized groups as bases for reparative planning and design.

Song serves on the Advisory Board of the non-profit participatory planning organization, Yayasan Kota Kita. She was previously a Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she was Founding Coordinator of Harvard CoDesign, a GSD initiative to strengthen links between design pedagogy, research, practice, and activism. Previously, Song was a Provost Fellow at University College London and holds a doctorate in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, where she was an active member of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab).